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It’s Hard Work Being Lazy or Chicken Coop Automation Part 1: Door Hardware

~ joelshaw@sbcglobal.net ~ 2 Comments

That title might be a little deceptive. Let me elaborate. I will work hard on something now anticipating it will allow for laziness in the future. “Laziness in the future” allows time to work hard on something else in the future, so I can be lazy about that in the more distant future… which allows me to be even more lazy about even more things in the even more distant future. I guess I am just doing my best to maximize my laziness.

All of that leads into an update on my first post. It was about a chicken coop and my reluctance to got out and open it every morning and close it every night. It has been in operation for years now, I’ve automated another, and I want to provide an update. Maybe it will help someone else to maximize their laziness.

 

BACKGROUND

My original coop is a semi-portable “chicken tractor” designed to be moved about the yard on wheels. In theory, I could periodically move the tractor and fertilize different sections of the yard. In practice, it obliterated all plant life anywhere near its presence. While it failed as a fertilizer, it succeeded that much more in my maximization of laziness! I no longer need to move it about the yard.

I bought the chicken tractor on Craigslist, so the coop door (visible here and here) was a 12″ X 12″ piece of plastic that slides horizontally to open and close.

My second coop was built around laziness with a door that opens and closes by sliding vertically. It also has features allowing it to be cleaned in a few minutes, supplying weeks of food and water, and can be shut in if it is cold. However, my FAVORITE feature is the slick ramp out of the door. If I “accidentally” increase the slope by removing the bricks at the bottom, the chickens can’t get enough traction and fall right down it.

Door Automation Hardware:

I am not going to provide details on the watering and feeding system in this post. I decided not to actively control those because mechanical systems were too simple and reliable. I am also not going to go into details due to space, boredom of the reader, and my laziness. Feel free to comment with questions and I will elaborate.

The chicken tractor door was not designed with electric controls in mind, so it required some jackassery. Its motive force is supplied by an electric screwdriver. I removed the guts and wired it directly to a relay that is controlled via an Arduino microcontroller. It has an angle attachment from a drill that rotates the drive axis by 90 degrees. It also has micro switches to detect when the movement of the door has reached its limits.

The chicken coop door uses a universal power antenna mechanism for the automotive industry but controlled by an Arduino microcontroller. Using an antenna was not my idea, there are multiple examples on the internet so I don’t know who to give credit.

The power antenna took some adaptation due to the door’s weight. When winter brought colder temperatures, an internal clutch mechanism would slip rather than lifting the door. I disassembled the antenna and found I could modify the clutch mechanism to increase its torque output. Things were great until summer brought warmth and the modified clutch transferred too much torque, stripping the internal gears.

Rather than continually adjusting the clutch mechanism based on the weather forecast (minimizing laziness), I opted to make a counterweight (maximizing laziness). It consisted of a couple clothesline pulleys, an Oxford comma, some string, and couple pieces of 2×4. Notice their odd shape. I cut off pieces off to balance their weight with the door (with the drive mechanism unattached).

After putting all of the work into these coops, I began to wonder if it was worth it. Do the chickens even need a door that closes at night? If they’ve been around for thousand and thousands of years, shouldn’t they be able to fend for themselves? The answer is no, they are unable to fend for themselves. One night there was a glitch and the door didn’t close. When I went out to check on them, I found a headless chicken laying on the floor. I have since remedied the glitch, and the offender has been dispatched to a better (maybe worse) place.

This has gotten longer than intended, so I have provided some information on the control algorithm in this link.

Overall, both of the coop’s door mechanisms have afforded me the opportunity to be quite lazy indeed! So lazy that I can’t even bring myself to finish this senten

How I Found Myself with a Foundry

~ joelshaw@sbcglobal.net ~ 5 Comments

Ever wanted to know the steps to building and using your own foundry? It has been quite a few years and involved some jackassery, but as I recall it went something like this:

 

  1. Start working on a Lotus Esprit and realize you need a unique washer that is hard to come by (about $5 if available).
  2. Buy a metalworking lathe to make said spacer.
  3. Discover that the lathe is missing a part.
  4. Get frustrated that the part is just an aluminum block but costs $100 with shipping.
  5. Realize that the part wouldn’t be too hard to cast.
  6. Source aluminum flashing, ceramic wool, ceramic paper, sodium silicate, nichrome wire, a temperature controller, a crucible, and castable refractory mortar (totaling well over $100).
  7. Assemble sourced items to resemble a foundry.
  8. Obtain approximately 100 cans of Miller Lite.
  9. Drink approximately 100 cans of Miller Lite.
  10. Melt approximately 100 cans of Miller Lite.
  11. Sand cast the part for the lathe.
  12. Use the lathe to make the $5 washer for the Esprit.

Seems legit, right? I have a kiln now and will probably never use the foundry again, but I am glad I built it for two main reasons: it was a lot of fun and it was really dangerous!

I am including some pictures, but I am not going to include detailed instructions on actually making it. It is unsafe, and doing anything like this is a very bad idea. However, I will include some generalities and observations in case anyone wants to use any of this for a more rational project.

  • A good source of nichrome wire is from the heater elements of an electric dryer, and it seems to be good to about 2000 F. It is important to do your homework on the length. It must have enough resistance to limit the current or it will be annihilated as soon as it is powered up.
  • Sodium Silicate (or water glass) is really neat stuff. I used it as a stiffener and makeshift adhesive for the ceramic paper, but it can also be used for making things fire resistant.
  • Ceramic wool seems to be good to at least a couple thousand degrees Fahrenheit. It is also a good thermal insulator. I had no problem touching the outside when it was 1700 F inside. You can also see that the electrical tape around the flashing didn’t melt or deform after operation.
  • I heard that ceramic wool became readily available due to technology development for the space industry. That might be a rumor, but I would rather perpetuate it than research it. Feel free to let me know if I am wrong, and you will be eligible for today’s Pettiness Award.
  • The crucible is not shown, but I initially used a cast iron pot to hold molten aluminum. I do not know if anything leached from the cast iron into the aluminum, but it hasn’t effected the functionality of the part.
  • the whole thing ended up fairly light weight. I remember it being about 20 lbs.
  • If you are thinking about making something like this to avoid buying a part, don’t. Just buy the part.

Feel free to comment if there are any questions. I don’t think I will ever use this again, but I might use some of things I learned for another project. Anyone interested in a portable electric “wood fired” 1000 Fahrenheit pizza oven?

Healthy Pizza or Unhealthy Hummus?

~ joelshaw@sbcglobal.net ~ Leave a comment

I have had an ongoing love affair with pizza as long as I can remember. I have had a disdain for foods like hummus for almost as long. That is quickly changing (my dislike of hummus, not my love of pizza). Strangely enough, this change is partially due to my engineering background.

I’ve always thought pressure cookers were a neat concept. Why not? They use physics to trick mother nature into allowing water to boil at a higher temperature. I never had one to play with, but my sister bought me and my wife an Instant Pot for our wedding. It seemed that beans benefited the most from this process, hummus is mostly beans, so here we are.

Returning to my love of pizza: over the years, I’ve experimented with pizza variants. One of the biggest disasters was my attempt at making pizza sausage. Note that I wrote pizza sausage, not sausage pizza (image to the left). To all of the naysayers that said it would never work, you were correct… at least thus far.

Now to pull my stories of pizza and hummus together. While looking for bean and hummus recipes, I discovered that there were people making pizza hummus. I thought that would be a great way to test out our new pressure cooker, looked at some recipes online, picked one, and started playing around.

The base recipe came from www.wholenewmom.com, but I decided to make some changes. You can see some of the iterations in my notes to the right (no, I am not a doctor). I really liked the last batch, so I am finalizing the recipe.

 

Pizza Hummus

  • 8 oz (half bag) of dry garbanzo beans cooked 45 min under high pressure
  • 1/2 cup olive oil
  • a bunch of peeled garlic (8 -10 cloves)
  • 1 1/2 tsp salt
  • 1 3/8 cup  +/- water from the cooked garbanzo beans
  • Small can tomato paste (8 oz)
  • 1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese
  • 2 tsp red peppers
  • 1 tsp fennel
  • 4 tsp basil
  • 1 1/2 tsp oregano

Put all of the ingredients in a food processor and beat the heck out of them.

Procedurally, I have learned some things that might be helpful:

  • I find it necessary to mix for much longer than I would have thought necessary, 10-15 minutes on high.
  • Some people peel the beans for a smoother consistency, I just pummel them into submission.
  • Since the garbonzo beans seem to take the longest to beat down, put them in the food processor with the oil and start abusing them while you measure everything else out.
  • I minced the garlic when I began playing with this recipe. Now I just peel it and throw it in while the food processor annihilates the garbanzo beans.
  • Once close to the final amount of water, a little bit goes a long way towards adjusting the consistency. Save some of it to slowly add at the end to obtain the desired consistency.
  • The red peppers add much more heat to the hummus after it sits for several days.
  • I started grinding up the last 4 items in a coffee/spice grinder (red peppers, fennel, basil, oregano) to increase the smoothness. These also seems to release the heat of the red peppers immediately.
  • Use the food processor to thrash the garbanzo beans just a little more.
  • The hummus will thicken upon cooling.

If things go well, a post in the near future might be titled “Healthy Wings or Unhealthy Hummus.” Any guesses what it will be about?

An Egg-cellent Drying Rack?

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There is quite the online debate about washing fresh eggs versus leaving them unwashed. I sometimes find “nastiness” (most polite term I can think of) on eggs when I retrieve them from the nest box. I feel the “nastiness” should be rinsed off, but there is also something called a “bloom” protecting the eggs. Some feel the bloom should be retained at the expense of the “nastiness”. I personally don’t want the blooming “nastiness” in the fridge, so I rinse the eggs.

Debate aside, I needed a way to dry the eggs after rinsing and before storage. I searched the intergoogles and found all sorts of egg stands, but I couldn’t find one that exactly met my needs:

  • Open to allow the surface of the eggs to dry
  • Minimal points of contact to allow water to drip off of the eggs
  • Something to catch the water so it doesn’t make a mess

 

I finally settle on the design shown to the left that uses about $1.50 worth of materials. It is simply a couple 2×4’s with some holes and a few dowels glued through them. It comfortably holds 4 eggs, uncomfortably holds 5, and can accommodate 6 in a bind. The width is matched to a paper towel which is used to catch the drips and can be disposed of after several uses. It has also been stained and painted with polyurethane for sanitary purposes.

In retrospect, I wish I had made the stand a few inches wider and fitted to some sort of drip tray. I might save up another $1.50 to make a better one if I get more chickens or time.

Pizza! Propane! Pepperoni! and Science?

~ joelshaw@sbcglobal.net ~ Leave a comment

During my time on this planet, I have picked up a number of things:

  • The Earth is probably not flat
  • It is likely that man once landed on the moon
  • 2+2 is mostly 4
  • Pizza is the best foodKIMG Renamed (81)

While the first few items are debatable, the 4th item is a well established scientific fact.

 

 

I typically prefer the simplicity of getting pizza from a local purveyor, but I also like to tinker with making it at home. Knowing that that dedicated pizza ovens at restaurants go to 700+ degrees Fahrenheit , I’ve toyed with the idea of modifying the controls of my kitchen oven to get to those levels. While I have used a thermocouple to measure the oven temperature during a cleaning cycle at well over 900 degrees F, the insurance companies and sensibility frown at such behavior. I decided to take it outside.

I once got distracted while my propane grill was heating up, and I left it on high for a bit too long. When I got back, I noticed a burning smell and that the temperature gauge was maxed out. This made me curious about two things:

  • How hot did it get
  • How hot could it get

I couldn’t figure out the former, but I could definitely figure out the latter. I made an enclosure with some bricks and got it to about 1050 F. It took a small optimized (open on the bottom) enclosure to get to that temperature, but I figured a pizza sized enclosure could get to an ambient temperature of at least 700 F.

I initially attempted using a piece of granite (a drop from a countertop manufacturer) set on bricks as the top of the oven and another rectangular granite drop as the cooking surface. I really thought that the granite would crack and all would be for naught. It  did not crack, but as a cooking surface it acted too much as an insulator. The heat went around it rather than heating the cooking surface.

For my next attempt I bought a round pizza stone from Wal-Mart for about 8 bucks, cut it to fit with an abrasive masonry blade, and tried it out.  I don’t know if it was the round geometry letting more heat by or if it was the thermal conductivity of the pizza stone, but it worked great.KIMG0117

 

Shown above is the last iteration. It has bricks supporting the granite drop for the top of the oven and the pizza stone as the cooking surface. It maintains about 750 – 850 F and will evenly cook a pizzas in about 4-5 minutes after heating up for about 20 minutes.

I still want to make a wood-fired pizza oven sometime in the future, but I don’t know when that will happen. The design is still being over thought and over engineered.